In
a letter titled "Daylight exacerbates warming" on the April
16 editorial page of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, a lady from Hot
Springs noted March 2007 as the warmest on record. To "any reasonable
person" this should come as no surprise, she says, because Daylight
Saving Time was started almost a month early this year. Congress should
have known what a warming effect an extra hour of daylight would have
on our climate...or maybe our liberal Congress did know, and it’s
part of a plot to make us believe that global warming is a genuine menace?
Of course implicit in this rationale is the solution to global warming.
Would it take a scientist to realize we only need to set our clocks
back a few hours, and the decrease in daylight the planet receives will
be our deliverance?

Though the letter was satiric,
coming from deep in Bush country made it virtually impossible to tell.
After all, the islamofascists hate us for our freedoms. Brownie did
a heckuva job after hurricane Katrina. Our "decider" has an
open line to God. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has nothing to
do with oil—Saddam was in cahoots with Bin Laden, and now we must
deliver freedom and democracy to the good people of Iraq. Mission Accomplished
(or was that Accomplishmented?) No child left behind. Nineteen Arab
boys with box cutters defeated the defenses of world’s mightiest
nation (apparently because somebody didn’t do a heckuva job)—the
leader’s passport was even found on the sidewalk near one of the
twin towers, having flittered down, a sacred white pigeon supernaturally
protected from the fires of hell. A Boeing airliner punched a hole in
the Pentagon you couldn’t squeeze a Volkswagen Beetle through—without
even mussing up the lawn.

And chocolate milk? Polls
suggest the number of Americans believing it comes from chocolate cows
is sobering. Bread comes from the store. Gas comes from the pump. Presidents
are who most of the people voted for. Noah built an ark, then it rained
like a son-of-a-bitch on this planet now over six thousand years old....
Sometimes humorous, sometimes pathetic, often mind-boggling, rarely
boring—the profound ignorance plaguing America can get deadly
serious when it comes to science.

Could a reasonable person
with any grasp of physics watch the controlled demolition of the World
Trade Center’s building number 7 (WTC7), and not understand that
it was in fact a classic controlled demolition? [1] New WTC leaseholder
Larry Silverstein even said on Public television that they made the
decision to "pull" number 7, then watched the building collapse.[2]
A BBC reporter was scrambled off the air while describing the collapse
of the Solomon Building, or WTC7—with the building still standing
in clear view out the window behind her! [3] Twenty minutes early on
the report—OOPS! Would it take a scientist to make the intuitive
creep into wondering why WTC7 was wired for demolition before 9-11?
Would a general population with any perspective beyond YIKES! TERRORISTS!
accept FEMA’s official position that, after extensive and expensive
scientific investigation they are...ahem...not really sure why WTC7
collapsed? Must’ve had something to do with a diesel tank in the
building that had quite a bit of potential energy. Every bit as reasonable
and scientific an explanation is: Seeing what happened to the Twin Towers
terrified WTC7 into spontaneously collapsing into its own footprint
at nearly free-fall speed....

A stalwart ally of the perpetrators
of 9-11 remains the public’s ignorance of science, which nurtures
belief that on 9-11 there must have been some kind of science going
on that even scientists don’t really understand. Shrug. But there
is only one kind of science, that which has given us scientific "miracles"
we adore. Unfortunately, it has, lately been telling us things we don’t
want to hear regarding the way we’ve been programmed to live.

Bush people hate science.
Scientists employ the Scientific Method, presenting testable theories,
evidence and proven facts. Their reality-based guff runs counter to
that of Bushentists, who create their own realities, and consider political
dogma, religion, special interests and public relations the cornerstones
of science. For example, instead of trying to reconcile the design of
the Twin Towers with their preposterous collapse explanations, Bushentists
simply changed the designs to fit their reality. Never mind that the
Towers were built around massive concrete cores reinforced with 3-inch
steel rebar—cores massive enough to coat 3 square miles of Manhattan
with 3 inches of concrete dust after demolitions converted the cores
to roiling gray clouds reminiscent of another Mt. St. Helens eruption.
How could measly, starving fires in the Towers (most of the jet fuel
burned off in those Hollywood fireballs on impact) pulverize the cores
(for which FEMA substituted Wal*Mart trusses) and run detonations up
and down the Towers that spit out precision-cut steel beams before relaxing
into pools of molten steel seething at 1400 degrees Fahrenheit a week
later? [4] The Bushentists have already explained.

What is science? It has two
parts, actually, one being simply the application of the scientific
method; basically, the observation and description of things, followed
by a hypothesis to explain them, and make predictions, which are tested
by experiments for truth. [5] Let’s say your observation is: My
car won’t start. Applying the scientific method, you hypothesize
explanations such as dead battery if it won’t crank...to no gas
if the battery performs...to more detailed hypotheses if the engine
cranks and the tank has gas...hypotheses that may lead to a mechanic
finding a problem with the fuel pump relay. Application of the scientific
method is very simple, most of us do it often. The other part of the
definition of science: The body of knowledge acquired through application
of the scientific method, and that’s where things can get incredibly
complicated. However, basic understanding of the scientific method gives
a person all that is needed to know what science is, key to solving
the problem of ignorance of science.

Regarding that complicated
part, the body of knowledge, science has the simplest foundation: Truth.
The scientific method reliably cleanses the body of anything but truth.
Consider some of the great scientific achievements, such as the Voyager
missions. Any fudging of anything at any time would’ve meant failure.
Nature cannot be fooled. By adhering to truth at all times, the achievements
were amazing. But, truth is based on the "reality thing",
and the Bush administration, in creating its own reality, is based on
lies. Reports from the EPA, FDA and other federal agencies engaged in
science are routinely suppressed, or altered to mesh with administration
realities. Industry hacks with zero scientific training are appointed
to positions formerly occupied by people with scientific backgrounds.
The results continue to be very disturbing, even injecting into the
American reality that there are different kinds of science. "Junk"
science has become very popular as that which tells us things we don’t
want to hear, such as about global warming. Bush said of our enemies,
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and
our people, and neither do we." [6] One of the most insidious harms
might be in making the people constantly fearful of being scammed by
government, a fear polluting even our most crucial refuges of truth.
Bush people use cherry-picked intelligence to invade other countries
and steal their resources, just as they use cherry-picked science (take
what you want, deny the rest) to fit things into their reality.

Once again, science is science,
everything else is not science. Junk science is simply an oxymoron,
same as all the other kinds of science invading our vernacular. We embrace
marvels science has provided, but when science tells us that through
our culture of consumption we are consuming ourselves and especially
our descendants out of a home, we start throwing epithets at science.
Making over-consumption of resources our descendants will need simply
to survive the focus of our culture certainly strengthens the theory
that consumerism causes stupidity. Americans have so little understanding
of science, yet their opinions regarding things scientific are inexhaustible.
We deny certain things science is telling us, while at the same time
believing that science will somehow bail us out of the nightmare we
are consuming ourselves into. Those "mini-storage" compounds
popping up everywhere, receptacles for all the stuff we are running
out of places for, they represent one of the country’s fastest-growing
industries. Another industry growing like mad is that of private prisons,
which are becoming slave-labor installations to...you guessed it, make
more stuff that we’re running out of places for.

We have one planet with finite
resources. There is only one science, and when it tells us what damage
consumerism has wrought, perhaps instead of calling it bad names, we
should simply learn what science is, listen, and think.

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